BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:IC Monday Seminars : Bridging the Gap between Individual and Popul
 ation Views of Intraspecies Phylogenetics
DTSTART:20120430T161500
DTSTAMP:20260408T033253Z
UID:3ee842f73bfcd83205a64c382277ab9d8ff666d39f68bb490d41328c
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Russell Schwartz (CMU) - Hosted by Prof. B. Moret\nAbstr
 act\nModern high-throughput sequencing technologies have enabled a series 
 of major efforts to catalog intraspecies genetic variations\, dramatically
  increasing the amount of variation data available for humans and other we
 ll studied species.  In principle\, such data should allow us to characte
 rize the process of molecular evolution within single species with unprece
 dented precision. In practice\, however\, there is a large and growing gap
  between the amount of data we have available and our ability to use it pr
 oductively.\n\nThis talk will describe our effort to address this gap by c
 ombining elements of two major approaches to understanding genetic variati
 on data: a phylogenetic view\, which seeks to identify evolutionary trees 
 linking genotyped individuals\, and a population view\, which seeks to cat
 egorize individuals or pieces of their chromosomes into population subgrou
 ps defined by common recent ancestry. Each view brings to the problem its 
 own specialized models and algorithms in order to characterize the history
  of a species in different ways. By combining elements of both methods\, w
 e develop an approach for the problem of automatically inferring ``populat
 ion histories’’ that seek to characterize both the robustly supported 
 population substructure of a species and the sequence of divergence and ad
 mixture events by which that substructure developed. In this talk\, we wil
 l first discuss the motivation behind this work and the need for new metho
 ds for the problem. We will then explore computational issues in tackling 
 the problem by combining discrete algorithmic approaches from the field of
  phylogenetics with machine learning and statistical sampling approaches a
 dapted from statistical genetics. Finally\, we will examine how such metho
 ds work in practice on both simulated and real genetic variation data and 
 what they can tell us about the likely population history of the human spe
 cies.\n\n\nBiography\nRussell Schwartz received his Ph.D. in Computer Scie
 nce at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.  He then worked
  at Celera Genomics on genetic variation analysis before joining Carnegie 
 Mellon University in 2002\, where he is currently a Professor in the Depar
 tment of Biological Sciences and the Lane Center for Computational Biology
 .  His lab studies various problems in computational biology\, including 
 phylogenetics and population genetics\, cancer biology\, and simulation of
  complex biophysical systems.
LOCATION:INM 202
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR